Alain de Botton

Interesting take on success and taking meritocracy ideas too far.


iPhone Applications

iPhone ApplicationsFor me, the biggest new feature in the 2.0 iPhone update has definitely been the addition of the App Store.

I love the concept of applications on my mobile device and the ability to expand the functionality to meet my needs. Nobody has really done that successfully since the Palm phones and it’s great to see a modern take on that.

Although there’s a lot of crap in the store, the quality of the applications has been steadily increasing in the past weeks. My current favorites are Twinkle, Things (once it gets sync), Remote, Pennies, and WordPress.


Secrets

Secrets is a System Preferences pane that provides a “collection of Mac OS X user defaults.”

Very useful for all those hard to remember user defaults. And good for discovering new ones too!


WordPress iPhone Admin Plugin

Jared Bangs and Dan Cameron have recently released version 2.0 of their iPhone admin interface plugin for WordPress.

I just installed it and it seems to work quite nicely. Thanks guys.

The only limitation for me is that it’s hard to write long posts or add links on the iPhone. That has nothing to do with their plugin however. Just lack of copy/paste and fast typing on the device.

Note: This was all typed on the iPhone interface but the links were added on the laptop afterwards. Lesson is to only use the phone for quick entries with limited or no links.


Backing up iTunes Music

Bandwagon is giving away free tryouts to bloggers. So, I figured that I’d write a short review of the service and give it a spin once it ships.

The idea behind the service is simple: to backup people’s entire music collection online. It doesn’t seem like they have limits for how many GB of data they store but the service is 99$/year which will probably have a limited customer base. Online music backup has been discussed by other people in the past so there is definitely a market for it.

Bandwagon posted some screenshots of their interface as well which looks simple and nicely organized.

The one weird thing about the product that I can’t figure out is why they don’t aim for a more general backup platform. For instance, I could see the need for similar backup functionality for iPhoto. It would make it more enticing to customers to have a more complete online backup solution, rather than a bunch of unique specialized ones. Something like “iLife Backup”?

Anyway, all of this is speculation at this time, since I haven’t tried the actual service. They’re shipping on February 22nd; after that, I’ll write a fuller review.

Update: Well the service ended up being a dud. They’ve dropped it and started one where the user provides their own storage online. Pretty lame!